Research Links Climate Science Denial To Conspiracy Theories, But Skeptics Smell A Conspiracy

Research Links Climate Science Denial To Conspiracy Theories, But Skeptics Smell A Conspiracy

IF the world's conspiratorial blogosphere was broken up into food items on a wedding buffet table, then an eclectic array of plate-fillers would surely be on offer.

There would be canapés topped with faked moon landings and hors d'oeuvres of Government-backed plots to assassinate civil rights leaders.

Sandwich fillings would come from US military staff at Roswell in New Mexico (cheese and alien, anyone?). The alcoholic punch would be of the same vintage as that which the British Royal family gave Princess Diana's chauffeur, as part of their plot to kill her. All of the catering would be provided by the New World Order.

Then there's the salad of human-caused climate change being a hoax, with the world's climate scientists, national academies and the declining Arctic sea-ice all in on the conspiracy.

Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Western Australia (UWA), is about to publish research which shows that a strong indicator of the rejection of climate science is a willingness to accept conspiracy theories.

The study details the results of a controlled online questionnaire posted on blogs between August and October 2010.

Among the conspiracy theories tested, were the faking of Apollo moon landings, US government agencies plotting to assassinate Martin Luther King, Princess Diana's death being organised by members of the British Royal family and the US military covering up the recovery of an alien spacecraft that crashed in Roswell, New Mexico.

In the paper, Lewandowsky concludes that “endorsement of a cluster of conspiracy theories… predicts rejection of climate science”. The research also claims a correlation between people who endorse free-market economics and the “rejection of climate science”.

He told DeSmogBlog:

There's a fair bit of previous literature to suggest that conspiratorial thinking is part of science denial. Conspiratorial thinking is where people would seek to explain events by appealing to invisible, powerful collusions amongst individuals, rather than taking events at face value. The absence of evidence for the conspiracy is sometimes taken as evidence of its existence and any contradictory evidence is itself embedded into the conspiracy.

In his paper, Lewandowsky adds: “Endorsement of the free market also predicted the rejection of other established scientic findings, such as the facts that HIV causes AIDS and that smoking causes lung cancer.”

Given the well documented links between free market think-tanks and climate science misinformation, this finding isn't surprising.

But back to that “conspiracist ideation” trait which Lewandowsky and other researchers, such as Pascal Diethelmand Martin McKee, have identified among people who reject science.

Because rather fittingly, no sooner had Lewandowsky's paper begun to make headlines than the world's loose, nimble and definitely-not-conspiring network of climate skeptic blogs began to construct their own conspiracies about Lewandowsky's research.

The survey was conducted online and Lewandowsky's research team approached climate blogs requesting they post a link to the survey. Some eight “pro-science” blogs agreed to post the link, which gained 1147 responses.

Lewandowsky's researchers also emailed five popular skeptic blogs, but none of those approached posted the link to the questionnaire.

But had Lewandowsky actually fabricated the claim he had emailed five sceptic blogs, asked Anthony Watts, Jo Nova and others, smelling a consipracy.

“If Lewandowky’s claim about five skeptic blogs was fabricated, it appears to me that it would be misconduct under university policies,” wrote McIntyre.

Once McIntyre had come down from the conclusion he had just jumped to, he later admitted that actually, he had been emailed by one of Lewandowsky's researchers after all but offered a “dog ate my homework” excuse.

Meanwhile, Lewandowsky says he has been “inundated” with requests to release the names of the four remaining bloggers his team contacted.

But since the approaches to bloggers were conducted on the presumption of privacy, the academic has asked his university's ethics committee and the Australian Psychological Society if he is free to release their identities.

So now there's a conspiracy theory going around that I didn't contact them. It's a perfect, perfect illustration of conspiratorial thinking. It's illustrative of exactly the process I was analysing. People jump to conclusions on the basis of no evidence. I would love to be able to release those emails if given permission, because it means four more people will have egg on their faces. I'm anxiously waiting the permission to release this crucial information because it helps to identify people who engage in conspiratorial thinking rather than just searching their inboxes.

Lewandowsky revealed that two of the five skeptic blogs approached even replied to the email they were sent.

One stated “Thanks. I will take a look” and another asked “Can you tell me a bit more about the study and the research design?”

Perhaps an inbox search for these phrases might help some bloggers to move on from their latest conspiracy theory.

Or maybe, just maybe, the real story is that the New World Order hacked their email accounts or a CIA operative secretly dropped a memory-lapse drug into their fake moon juice?

Previous Comments

Are you denying that the US Geological society was making that claim? Its the same claim that Terry Jones and George Monbiot used to ambush Ian Plimer on live TV. These two men are simpletons. But even they would have known that this is a lie. Plimer pointed out the thousands of kilometres of live volcanoes under the sea. The claim that undersea CO2 output and above sea CO2 output are “about the same” is ridiculous on its face, and is clearly a lie. Since there are multiple estimates and studies that the two bureaucracies could have used, the fact that they both chose the same ridiculous estimate has to be considered international co-ordination.

Then we have the NASA dishonest use of the data, and yet the graphs they draw, are roughly similar to NOAA and Hadley. Proving again international co-ordination of misinformation. Then we had this conclusion reinforced by the revelation of the Hadley emails which proved international conspiracy on both sides of the Atlantic.

I haven't seen how NOAA gets its graphs. But they are known to be lying since they try and match it to the other two. NOAA also has monopolized on the reading of CO2 levels. Which means no CO2 readings can be independently verified. This must have been decades in the making, this monopoly. You have to hand it to the shadow government when it comes to taking the long view of things.

Here is some photographic analysis for Apollo 11 showing that the moonwalking was in fact staged. There is nothing to oppose this analysis and no getting around it. If it conflicts with your irrational beliefs see a psychiatrist. But don't be getting about running cover for the criminals that push these fraudulent and expensive undertakings on the public. These networks haven't gone away and they are busier then ever. The CO2-warming scam is scientific fraud. And its a far bigger, more ambitious, and more expensive scam then the moon hoax ever was.

No. Does he follow evidence as well? I can see where you are going with this. You are doing everything you can to run away from evidence and logic. This is a feature of global warming hoax supporters. People like Lewandowsky and Graham Readfearn. Never never never talk about evidence. Always be allergic to evidence. This is something to see, this modern hatred of evidence and reason.

“Never never never talk about evidence. Always be allergic to evidence.”

I just got through telling you that the AR4 has several thousand references….to evidence. So far, you have come onto this blog with nothing but rhetoric, for someone pretending to be all about the evidence.

The IPCC has no evidence WHATSOEVER that could justify this scam. None. Clearly you just have no clue as to what you are talking about. The IPCC has not even put together a valid reconstruction of historical CO2 levels. So it cannot even establish correlation let alone causation. They haven't even got started. We don't expect to find causation at this late stage since no-one has ever found evidence for it. But also since the apriori case for it is ridiculous. The only thing I can say in favour of the Watts-Per-Square-Metre armchair thinking, is that the Keynesian model may well be even more pathetic.

That is from 2010. I already told you I only looked into Apollo over the last two months. I assumed they had gone but I was aware that I didn't know because I hadn't looked into the matter.

You assume you have the gift of second sight. You think you can know that they went, without evidence that they went. Without looking into the evidence either way. I never pretend to have these capacities, and if it comes down to it, I would have to bow down to your astral travelling abilities.

What is. I can't read your thoughts….you are aware of this aren't you?

“You assume you have the gift of second sight. You think you can know that they went, without evidence that they went.”

Well, I can't say I have personally been there to take photo's, but plenty of astronomy enthusiasts have. Not to mention the fact that the Russians and other countries would love nothing more than to bust the Americans….yet haven't.

Not to mention the years of paying off various people for the cover up and no one has dobbed them in?

Its a fact they kept quiet about it. You cannot overturn solid science with sociological speculation. But the reverse is not true. That the Soviets either were taken in or did﻿ not spill the beans tells us something about how the elites of the two societies work together. The Soviet union was bankrolled by Wall Street after all. David Rockefeller could land his private jet at Moscow anytime he felt like it. Every Soviet leader would have been at a small but decisive disadvantage without outside sponsorship.

The Soviet excuse comes up a lot. But its not a scientific argument. I was only kidding about your capacity to read minds backwards in time, astral travel and so forth. There is a hierarchy of knowledge. You cannot say to yourself … 9/11 cannot be an inside job … how did they get in the building to place the explosives? and try and make this an argument, when its already established that the 3 buildings could not fall in that peculiar way, with the help of two planes alone. Once its proven that the Arabs blood libel is untenable you have to go with the science.

See there is this ongoing tendency to put the sociology ahead of hard science. But that the buildings did go﻿ down tells us something about the shadow government. Likewise with this Moon Hoax. We already know its a hoax, we need to understand what this means in terms of how our elites insinuate themselves into national governments.

Likewise with this global warming fraud. We know that underwater volcanic activity dwarfes the above ground stuff by many orders of magnitude. So what does the collusion between the US geological society and the UK geological society tell us? It tells us that there is far more collusion and wickedness present then what meets the eyes. Sometimes we are lucky and we get to see this up close, like with the conspiracy revealed by the leaked Hadley emails. But most of the time we simply have to infer it. And it will be the same network every time at the finance wing of it, since you or I could never get away with this behavior.

That Apollo moonwalking was a fraud is a fact. Proved totally and to the nth degree. Everyone on this blog and on Randi's internet sewer could get together and wish upon a star and it won't change the fact of Apollo fraud. Randi's people are closet believers in Woo. They think that by their faith they can alter history, and change the nature of physical reality.

Lying all the time is deeply imbedded into the culture of NASA. They even go so far as to lie about comets being snowballs. They perpetrate crank science like the belief in the big bang. If they can lie about comets being snowballs there is nothing they won't lie about big or small.

All you are doing is showing how easily you will swallow abolute twaddle if by doing so you can convince yourself you are smarter than everyone else. You will not let yourself understand why others think conspiracy theories like the ones you support are rubbish. Until you can conquer your conceit there can be no rational argument with you.

No sorry you dope. Already I know you are pulling the leftist reversal. I already know that you've bought into the global warming fraud without a scrap of evidence. You've brought into the big bang, the greatest embarrassment of modern science. You, like a fool believe in special relativity, you've bought into the moon hoax, you may well think central banks and fractional reserve is a good idea, but you definitely have bought into the idea that comets are snowballs. I can tell already that you think there is something in the Keynesian multiplier.

All these ideas you naively and idiotically buy into because you don't believe in the need for scientific evidence. This is the absolute twaddle you've bought into. Always the reason is the same. You believe in believing what you are told and you have no use for scientific evidence or reason.

Leftist? Well maybe by US standards I might be slightly left of center but not by the standards of any other country.

I actually have looked at the evidence. I actually understand the science. I actually have worked in science and know its methods. I have actually abandoned ideological positions when scientific or historical evidence has gone against them. I am actually curious and want to understand what is happening rather than prove others wrong.

Might I suggest that you not make guesses about my politics and opinions on economics? At least not when I haven't mentioned them. It only makes you look more foolish.

You buy into all those things that I claimed that you would buy into don't you? Therefore you are not capable of following evidence. As for the moon hoax, I've only just looked into it. I was at least aware that I hadn't looked into it, even though I expected to find out that they did make it. But they didn't.

You haven't looked into the CO2-warming fraud if you still believe in it. You cannot think at all if you still buy into the big bang.

So you say you looked into the CO2-warming scam and you found that it wasn't a scam? Well you must have found some evidence then. Well fire away. Do you even know what you were trying to find evidence for?

What we are looking for, since we have one doofus here that reckons he's weighed the evidence and come out in favour of the global warming racket.

We needed:

1. Evidence for the likelihood of catastrophic warming.

2. Evidence that a little bit of human-based warming, during a brutal and pulverising ice age ……. is a bad thing …

3. Evidence that extra-CO2 warms the earth globally, and at sea level, even a little bit.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

There may be many ways of proving all three of these propositions. But first off you'd at least expect an effort to reconstruct the CO2 record. As far as I remember no global warming pusher would ever want to go near any valid CO2 record. So I don't know why you imagine yourself (Lloyd Flack) competent to weigh the evidence in this matter.

No you are lying. There is no evidence. And if you looked into it and still buy into it, then you are not competent in science. The politics of this matter is pretty simple. Its being pushed from the top down. Its being pushed from the top and sheeple like yourself are in your role of force-multipliers and useful idiots.

You moron. You complete idiot. So you actually bought into their flat earth watts per square metre model. You pillock. Not only does this movement lack empirical evidence. It lacks any sort of valid a priori reasoning behind it.

You said that you do not believe special relativity. Yet calculations based on it are made every day and the results agree with reality. Why are you making this claim? Are you claiming that there is a conspiracy here? For what purpose? What is you reason for disageeing with the science? Is it because it is counter intuitive?

You don't need to believe in special relativity to make those calculations, so the calculations don't constitute evidence for the theory. In fact you won't find evidence for the theory anywhere.

Think of the initial public hoo-ha that went to support special relativity. Its 1919, and the lads travelled out to see an eclipse. They didn't find any evidence for special relativity, and yet they came home to this huge burst of publicity. What they did is they failed to falsify. A failure to falsify is a waste of money. Today most studies are of this nature.

Newton never claimed that light would bend the way it was assumed. Einstein did a thought experiment to do with lifts, light, acceleration and gravity that was entirely consistent with Newton and did not verify any of his (Einsteins) wild claims. He included a stipulation that his own ideas would be wrong if the light bent by such and such amount. This ought never have implied evidence for his other wild ideas. So it was only a lot of publicity that won this story over.

I don't know about there being a conspiracy behind his ideas getting off the ground. There is certainly a great deal of lying keeping them off the ground however. That Wikipedia conspires to keep falsification of Einsteins foolishness off its pages may seem to imply conspiracy since Wiki is a captured site. If you wanted to hog military secrets and technology for sure there could be a reason to keep promoting wrong and dated ideas. Because these wrong ideas get in the way of further development on the part of possible competitors. Stories of experimenters being obstructed and interferred with are legion. You will find that most people in favour of Einsteins system concentrate on lying and the cult of personality to support these ideas. He's a lovable figure, but many of his ideas were pretty silly. They are pseudo-religious in that they employ “reification.”

The 1919 observations concerned the effect of gravity. That is general relativity, not special relativity. Don't you think it might be an idea to find out what the terms mean? This is not a little slip. This is gross carelessness.

You idiot. The point is that it was held to be evidence for Einsteins ideas generally, when it was no such thing. Get your act together. The point was that this was when Einsteins ideas were foisted on the public and began to get general currency. Quite independent of the non-evidence that the expedition was responsible for.

General relativity sits on top of special relativity and is a fudge factor for it. Its a movable feast. To refute special relativity is to take down general relativity with it. But its special relativity where the nuttiness and woo is concentrated. So thats what I focus on.

Every day someone operates a sychrotron. Every one works. Every day particles inside one follow the paths predicted by special relativity. Every day it is proven that you don't know what you are talking about.

Now you are just being silly. In the same way as you cannot accelerate a particle past the speed of light with a sychrotron, you aren't going to break the sound barrier with a propeller driven plane. Thats why the energy requirement spirals up to infinite. Yet breaking c is more or less routine. Nor was there any reason ever to believe in a light speed barrier.

There you go. Responding to something that I didn't say and attributing to me things that I didn't say. And contradicting yourself too.

I said nothing about speed of sound or planes. I said nothing about anything being acccelerated past the speed of light. Quite the contrary, particles accelerated by a synchrotron approach but never reach the speed of light. But they undergo the mass changes predicted by special relativity. We know this by their paths and the energy that they have. But nothing has been observed exceeding the speed of light.

Are you confusing the speed of light with that of sound? c is the speed of light not that of sound. So are you claiming objects can go faster than light or not? You admitted that a particle cannot be accelerated pat c using a synchrotron. but then talked of breaking c being routine.

No they don't undergo any mass changes. How do you think the alleged mass changes they don't undergo are wrongly perceived? They are perceived by the increasing amount of energy needed to get them closer to the speed of light. This is just our public servants at work.

If we stuck rigidly to the dogma that the propeller-driven plane we set up in a flying zone in a giant complex in space (ie without gravity) ….. that the propeller-driven plane was gaining mass, as it approached the speed of sound, we would wind up finding out what we wrongly thought we already knew. Because no matter how much energy we poured into the propellers they simply could not make the plane outrun the speed of sound.

This is how useless public servant science is. Because they steadfastly insist on only keeping one paradigm in mind when they observe data. Whereas science is all about building competing paradigms in parallel. This is how you've managed to clench to the CO2 dogma all this time like you were holding a $50 note between your butt-cheeks. You only ever had the flat earth model of watts per square metre under consideration in the first place. Since you only had one paradigm under consideration, it began to look almost axiomatic to you. Whereas in sober cold reality, its a ridiculous model from the ground up.

Likewise special relativity. Stupid from the ground up and internally contradictory. A simple dogma of velocity absolutism, wrongly named to hide its silly construction. Bad theology posing as science.

They know of the mass changes by the paths that particles follow. If particles did not follow their expected paths synchrotrons would not work. They have beed designed to work in a universe where special relativity applies. If it did not the particles would follow different paths and strike the walls of the synchrotron.

No they don't know the mass changes. The mass doesn't change. They merely interpret changing mass because of loyalty to the dogma. They aren't testing other paradigms at the same time as they make this dogmatic interpretation, so they aren't conducting any science, any more than continually switching on and off a light is conducting science.

Even the allegation that they can track the path of a single proton or electron is deeply suspect. What is the evidence that they put forward to claim that they have such a path? A trail of bubbles? Some other practical application of a failure of logic? And what is the logic to say that an altered path means more mass? These are the people whom logic forgot. They are just public servants.

Any sub-atomic conjecture is open to circular reasoning. If you want to try and justify the self-contradictory idiocy of special relativity, you need something large. The belly-crawling unscientists always grasp at the subatomic for their non-evidence. You need something large. Like a ball of steel. Obviously conjecture about things that no-one can see or observe isn't going to make the nut. But you will see that relativists will always shy away from real experiments since they know they will be proved wrong.

Thats a lie for starters. Everyone knows its a lie. But trained physicists prefer not to talk about it in mixed company. Then they wil go through an whole series of obscurantist steps to confuse third parties when they are fully busted. This series of steps usually starts with some talk about the non-existent tachyon. Really what is needed is a lot of sackings. Mass-sackings so the survivors will begin to behave and actually do real work.

I think we have a new winner for the Bogdanov award!

Who said anything about particles? Obviously when you are using electro-magnetic energy to accelerate something, then that thing cannot be accelerated faster then the electro-magnetic energy that you are using to do the acceleration. You would think that even a dim bulb like Benson could understand such a thing.

But beating c is routine, as you well know. We used to have an whole page on it at wiki before it was censored. Google it yourself.

That is a completely ridiculous claim. You are saying that the engineers built it to work, and it wouldn't work but for a wrong theory.

Moronic. The engineers aren't going to build something in order so that it fail. They aren't going to callibrate a machine for failure. The theory is wrong because velocity is a relative concept. The theory is wrong because right now you can feel the force of your ass against the chair. Even though there is no space in between to curve. Even though space cannot curve. So the idea that gravity is caused by curvature in space is double dipping since we already know that gravity is a force.

You cannot gain mass due to velocity since velocity is purely relative. The moving particle and the stationary experimenter ….. neither of the two can be said to be moving or stationary since velocity is relative.

If he said that it would be more idiocy. Time is a derived concept. c is not infinite speed. Gravity propagates much much much faster than c or all the orbits would unwind. So this is just total idiocy. And emprically its wrong since there is no speed limit and c is being beaten routinely. I doubt that Einstein said this, but if he did we might consider whether there was too much Mercury in his area.

Remember I've already pointed out that these wrong ideas stay aloft only because of relentless lying and the cult of personality. There is likely to be conspirational action as well, but who would need it? What with all the sheeple and goose-steppers who are willing to go along with proven wrong and baseless theory?

I know. It was interesting to see how far he would go to hang onto his paranoid beliefs. I don't normally have contact even on the internet with anyone like that. And it was amusing, as in “Look at the funny man.”. But I think I've had enough of that.

And I do try to correct what I think are errors and try to get people to reconsider things. I usually present arguments and try more to get prople to seriously consider them than I try to convince. But I know no way to deal with extreme forms of motivated reasoning like here. I know no way to get someone like him to look at what he's doing.

See you're an idiot. You are not a scientist. You've given up on evidence. You've given up on reason. You have no capacity to tell good theory from bad. Can you tell Austrian from Keynesian theory and judge as to which one is useful?

This is why you are a global warming fraud believer despite absolute crap theory, and no empirical evidence. We don't even know if the effect of extra CO2 causes net cooling or net warming at sea level. I tend to assume that it will be net cooling. Others sort of think that there will be a tiny bit of extra warming. But what we know for an absolute fact that it is a tiny effect either way. We know this because no evidence has emerged either way so the effect MUST be minimal.

And your stupidity calling me paranoid means that you've thrown scientific judgement and are putting a theory of sociology ahead of scientific evidence.

You ARE hopeless. You wouldn't be supporting this clear scientific fraud … clearer then Piltdown man … if you weren't hopeless. You haven't read a single study which has provided evidence that could support this clear science fraud. Not one. Not even one. There isn't one out there. Last I looked the promoters of this crap were running a million miles from any sort of CO2 reconstruction. It ought to have been a simple data and attribution exercise.

What is wrong with you man? How is it that you are so mentally deranged that you are particpating in this rubbish movement when I know for a fact that you have no apriori case for it, and you haven't been presented with evidence for it? This is just derangement.

Now some of you reckon you understand this climate science. No you don't. If you did you would have rejected their model. Still let us see you build it up on an apriori basis.

Here we have a flat planet, which complies with the requirement of being a “black body.” This flat planet is twice as far from the sun as the earth. Its not rotating, and therefore its noon all the time. Now build up the climate model from this starting point. You will see that you have to make one irrational leap after another to get to the watts per square metre model.

Democracy is utterly dependent upon an electorate that is accurately informed. In promoting climate change denial (and often denying their responsibility for doing so) industry has done more than endanger the environment. It has undermined democracy.

There is a vast difference between putting forth a point of view, honestly held, and intentionally sowing the seeds of confusion. Free speech does not include the right to deceive. Deception is not a point of view. And the right to disagree does not include a right to intentionally subvert the public awareness.